Hedy Lamarr Was 007 + Q

Pursuant to today’s Google Doodle, here’s a piece I wrote for Maxim years ago, about why Hedy Lamarr is your hero and/or fantasy woman:

TIME CRUSH: Hedy Lamarr

Listen, brother, there are more ladies in Heaven than Earth, and these are the ones we dream of in our philogyny. If Maxim were around in Ancient Egypt, we’d flirtatiously interview Cleopatra. And then she would find a creative way to have us killed, but–look, that’s not the point. The point is you need to know who the attractive women are in any time period, just in case you’re too busy looking at your phone to watch where you’re going and stumble into a black hole one day. Case in point: Hedy Lamarr.

Most actresses want to play Bond Girls, but Lamarr actually was one. Her first husband was a weapons manufacturer (Moonraker) who treated her horribly (Tomorrow Never Dies, Casino Royale, etc.), and threw parties attended by Hitler and Mussolini, where he presumably unveiled schemes for satellites that would wipe Buckingham Palace off the map. Less certain: whether anyone awkwardly told Hitler he was attending a party thrown by a Jewish couple.

Fed up with all the domestic torture and Hitler-coddling, Lamarr fled the arranged marriage disguised as a maid, and got a divorce in Paris. You may choose to believe the Deleted Scene version of her escape, in which she went to a lavish party wearing every piece of jewelry she owned, drugged her husband, and fled on rocket skis down the Alps, accompanied by a mysterious Englishman in a tuxedo. Okay, we only made up half of that sentence.

Speaking of deleted scenes, prior to her marriage, the 19-year-old had already filmed nude scenes in her acting debut Ecstasy, a Czech film about an older man who mistreats his insanely hot wife, because life imitates art. According to her, the sex scenes were real, but her orgasmic expression was caused by the director poking her rear with a pin, which…are we supposed to be turned on by that as well? We can’t tell in this kooky set of 1930s sexual standards. All we know is that exposed knees are scandalous…and hot.

Over the next thirty years she made as many millions of dollars (and that’s then-money, not now-money, which is worthless), and spent it all. On what? Nobody knows! So here’s an unsubstantiated guess: moon bases. Because Hedy Lamarr took her big math brain (The World is Not Enough, Moonraker again) and applied everything she’d picked up as her husband’s constant companion at military design and production meetings to file a patent titled “Secret Communication System.” The frequency-hopping scheme was used to keep radio-controlled torpedoes out of enemy control, and became the basis for much of the nifty technology we enjoy today, such as Wi-Fi and the nudity we enjoy over Wi-Fi, such as Ecstasy. My god–it’s all connected!

Brendan McGinley invented time-travel, but accidentally prevented himself from ever inventing it